“Seeing dunes on Pluto — if that is what they are — would be completely wild, because Pluto’s atmosphere today is so thin,” said William B. McKinnon, a GGI deputy lead from Washington University, St. Louis, in a news release. “Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven’t figured …

Mars is a fixer-upper of a planet from our perspective, as Elon Musk told Stephen Colbert Wednesday on Late Night. It’s got some of the basics: Water (both surface and subsurface ice), sunlight (naturally) … As Universe Today adds: “Both planets have roughly the same amount of land surface area, sustained polar caps, and both …

Highest resolution photos yet of the mysterious bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres show a complex of material that looks a lot like reflective residue such as salt or something like it, though the agency hasn’t made a ruling yet. Here’s the new higher-res photo in a zoomable format (details in gallery below): ExtraZoom …

Written by Seth Shostak, SETI Institute UFOs: The Trail is Stale. One thing that strikes me about claims of alien visitation is that so much of the evidence is musty and fusty. Every day, I get stories and articles from people around the world who aggregate UFO news. But much of it is not news …

Scene: Godzilla El Niño walks into a bar and there sits smokin’ hot California with an empty glass. Always generous, Godzilla approaches the bar and orders a double for California … a bit more than Cal wants in one sitting, but what the hell. The bartender puts on a sheepish look and glances down the …

Looking a lot like how Hollywood might portray an invasion by space aliens, videos began surfacing Sunday of strange fireballs streaking across the night sky over Hawaii islands. News reports from the Honolulu TV station KHON2 and news source MauiNow.com peg the light source as space debris burning up in the atmosphere. MauiNow reported: According to information released by …

“‘The ISS is being monitored by aliens’: Conspiracy theorists spot yet another UFO hovering above the space station” … That’s from the Daily Mail. The baseline story is this: A recorded archive on NASA’s Ustream channel of the Aug. 3 live video feed from the International Space Station shows a pinkish, bright something or other floating above …

The last time we wrote about “pingos” they were popping open in Siberia (see gallery below). Then we saw the latest photo from the Dawn spacecraft flying around the dwarf planet Ceres and thought: Pingo! Here’s that sharper, closer image in zoomable format: ExtraZoom high resolution image This is what NASA said about it: NASA’s …